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Investigating Indian SMBs to identify critical business use cases in need of digital interventions
How small and medium businesses perceive, adopt, and struggle with digital tools, and where the most impactful opportunities for intervention lie
Duration & TEAM
8 weeks · 3 researchers
My Role
UX Researcher
Methods Used
Recruiting participants · Moderating interviews · Analysing data ·
Generating themes and insights · Paving direction for conceptualisation · Documentation
participants
17 SMB owners across utilities,
manufacturing, technology, healthcare,
finance, automotive, and retail
WHY THIS RESEARCH WAS CONDUCTED
A little bit of context
Imagine, you're running a small business where you and your team juggle multiple roles, handling clients, managing operations, following up on payments, and trying to grow all at once. Every day is a race with scattered emails, WhatsApp messages, and Excel sheets keeping things barely on track. Multiple tools promise to ease this burden, offering automations, smarter workflows, and better decision-making. But can they truly integrate into the way small businesses operate, or do they add another layer of complexity?
SETTING UP THE PROBLEM
The rise of Gen AI is reshaping businesses through automation, content creation, and decision-making support. Indian SMBs are increasingly adopting digital tools to boost productivity and streamline operations, yet challenges like data security, usability, and personalised integration persist. The study explores how SMBs perceive and adopt various tools, their use cases for better tool integration, their pain points and expectations, offering insights to better serve their business needs.
RESEARCH GOALS
What we set out to understand
Imagine, you're running a small business where you and your team juggle multiple roles, handling clients, managing operations, following up on payments, and trying to grow all at once. Every day is a race with scattered emails, WhatsApp messages, and Excel sheets keeping things barely on track. Multiple tools promise to ease this burden, offering automations, smarter workflows, and better decision-making. But can they truly integrate into the way small businesses operate, or do they add another layer of complexity?
01
Understanding how businesses currently use digital tools in their day-to-day workflows.
02
Identifying pain points, gaps, and challenges businesses face while using these tools.
03
Identifying high-stakes use cases where digital interventions could benefit the business.
04
Understanding expectations from these digital tools.
UNDERSTANDING THE SMB LIFECYCLE
The journey we were targeting
Before diving into the research, it was essential to understand the overall journey of SMB owners through the different stages of running their business. Each stage carries distinct responsibilities, tools, and challenges.
THEMES WE EXPLORED
What we spoke to owners about
We spoke to SMB owners across multiple domains, from manufacturing to finance, healthcare, and utilities, to understand more about four areas that shaped the research.
Current workflow
Business process and daily activities, identifying how potential customers are found through online platforms, referrals, and outreach efforts.
Tools integration
Getting a better understanding of the use cases where the business heavily relies on digital tools, and where those tools fall short of what's needed.
Roadblocks
Getting insight into the systemic gaps that hamper daily functioning, operational friction that compounds across weeks and months.
Trust and security
Understanding potential concerns with respect to the tools owners use, particularly around data ownership, security, and willingness to adopt AI-driven solutions.
INITIAL OBSERVATIONS
Patterns from the initial conversations
Through the initial set of conversations with business owners, certain patterns started emerging. These gave a more focused direction to the remaining research, leading us to narrow into the Management and Delivery stages.
The primary hurdle lies in the insufficient time allocated for lead generation. In some instances, the owner bears sole responsibility for pitching to new clients, or manages a small team of 2 - 3 individuals for this task.
The task of awaiting client responses and sending out reminders poses a significant challenge, one that occupies a disproportionate share of the owner's attention.
Despite the availability of tools like Excel and Sheets, the manual effort involved in creating and updating plans becomes challenging, particularly when managing multiple engagements concurrently.
In some instances, there is no digital intervention, and tasks are manually recorded on paper or a blackboard. This method is susceptible to errors and can potentially cause delays in the overall process.
Finalising briefs, translating customer requirements, and conveying them to the delivery teams, whether in-house or outsourced, can be cumbersome. This process leads to idea gaps or information loss, resulting in multiple back-and-forth between the involved parties.
Failure to monitor deliveries and provide timely updates to customers poses a challenge.
Manual efforts are required for sending tracking updates, introducing inefficiencies. Ensuring continuous communication during the deployment or installation of a solution at the client's end is crucial.
Monitoring various accounts and tracking client payments is a cumbersome task.
JOURNEY MAP
Where things started to break
From our initial set of interviews, certain patterns started emerging. One of the ways we chose to distil the data was by plotting the current journey of the owners to find areas of concern that directly impact their day to day functioning as those would be the root causes that we will have to focus more on.
Because these findings pertain mostly to the Management and Delivery stages of the journey we decided to probe more on them for the remaining interviews. Pivoting to a nicher section of the journey as participants were facing significant issues in these stages.
INSIGHTS
What the research confirmed
After understanding the Management and Delivery stages in-depth, we were able to derive some concrete insights that would pave the way for future concepts that can be built for SMBs.
Insight 01
58%
Almost 58% of teams hesitate to adopt AI-based task automation, citing lack of integration with existing workflows and fear of losing control over task delegation.
Insight 03
95%
Approximately 95% of business owners opt for WhatsApp as their primary tool for document sharing and unofficial calls, citing its widespread acceptance and ease of use.
Insight 04
29%
29% of businesses hesitate to use AI or other digital tools for financial tracking, citing security concerns and the need for customised payment terms, resulting in additional manual efforts to monitor all the payments.
Insight 02
80% +
The capabilities of currently available cloud-based productivity tools limits in addressing the intricate project management needs of over 80% of users prompting them to turn to external tools, thus resulting in a fragmented workflow and increased efforts dedicated to tracking tasks.
Insight 04
18%
Only 18% of businesses have AI-driven logistics tracking, with some relying on third-party partners that lack AI integration. However, most businesses spend additional efforts to track this delivery data manually, resulting in inefficiencies in the workflow.
WAY FORWARD
Pathways for SMBs to adopt in future
Based on the insights derived, we came up with multiple pathways that SMBs can adopt to make their day-to-day functionings smoother and sustainable.
01
AI-integrated CRM and order management tools for SMBs to increase customer retention rates through personalised interactions and real-time updates.
03
Implementing automation for daily task tracking and work updates to enhance overall workflow efficiency. AI-powered tools that extract valuable insights from project tracking data, contributing towards informed decision-making, workflow optimisation, and strategic planning for effective business execution.
02
AI-powered invoicing and tracking systems that reduce late payments and improve cashflow predictability for SMBs. Designed to monitor all accounts and payment milestones for each project, the tool ensures timely invoicing and provides clients with ample time to complete the payment process.
04
Seamless integration of certain WhatsApp Business functionalities into digital workspaces to simplify adding, processing, and accessing intricate data thus avoiding loss of context.
CONCEPT MODEL
Translating research into tangible directions
Building further on these pathways, we drafted a concept model for easier implementation of the opportunity areas, thus laying the groundwork of translating the research into tangible outcomes.
These theme and feature combinations can be used by design teams in different ways across the SMB lifecycle to mitigate challenges around Management and Delivery phases, thus enhancing efficiency and business outcomes for them.
Thank you for stopping by!
I’m always learning, evolving and designing with curiosity, so if you have thoughts, feedback or just want to say hi, I’d love to hear from you!
© 2026 Anushka Belsare | Created With Empathy